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I know, I'm responding because I got the e-mail from SOE yesterday. As an aside, since EQOA predates PSN, payment and accounts are handled by SOE's PC gaming division. It's the only PS2 game that does that.

It's also the oldest console MMORPG, pre-dating FFXI. They made the last month free, I suppose I could login again...I quit a looong time ago, because I didn't really have the time to devote to a game with a monthly fee. I got kicked out of a guild or two in 03 or 04 because I didn't play enough. I

Of course the user base for star chamber is dwindling. There hasn't been an expansion since 2007. Collectible games need expansions to survive. Otherwise people get bored and move on.

Sony Online Entertainment. Where games go to die.

Doesn't have to be that way, has Sony even looked for a new buyer? Perhaps one of the players might even be interested in paying for the game and taking over, any alternative has got to be better than "Sony To Delete Virtual Goods".

Obviously someone is concerned enough over this to have the story posted on/.

Have you ever actually TRIED that? I have, I wanted to rescue some of the really funky ass old shareware titles that are damned near impossible to play on modern Windows and give them a new lease on life. i quickly found most of these companies expect something to the tune of 300%-3000% profits or they won't give you the time of day. I wish I had saved the emails so i could post 'em, one company wanted six figures for their "very valuable IP" when we are talking about something that wasn't even up to the level of "Codename:Tenka" but was one of those 50 bazillion Wolfenstein knockoff that came out back when that old thing was a hit and everyone tried to cash in.

I bet if you were to contact Sony their asking price is right around what you would expect to pay for GTA 3 or NWN, not some nearly dead card trading game. never underestimate the incredible all consuming greed of these people. This is why I'm so against the extended copyrights we now have, thanks to the insatiable greed of the megacorps by the time most things do come out of copyright they won't exist and any source code will have been destroyed decades ago. Thanks to these greedy bastards the history of electronic gaming is gonna be more spotty and incomplete than the fossil record and that's just sad.

The problem is without source code more and more of those games simply will have NO way to ever run, so many programs and games are quickly becoming unplayable. While DOSBox can save pre-Windows sadly it doesn't work worth a shit on Win9X era games and many of those are becoming completely unusable, programs too. You'd be surprised how many of the Win9X era games and programs simply won't run on modern hardware no matter what, they used hacks, made calls they shouldn't have, try getting something like Macro

Ha. Ha. Reminds me of the old saying "Denny's, Where waitresses go to die."

And diners, too... there's a saying around here: if you want to find excellent food, follow an old person to lunch. You'll either find the best food that 60 years of experience can find, or you'll arrive at Denny's.

ARE YOU INSANE? SOE was the first major MMO publisher to start charging different rates for different levels of content, and then again the first major MMO to have a real money for items auction house. The current disaster that is the MMO market was almost entirely modeled after SOE. Do you ever wonder why MMOs are almost universally $15.99/month? SOE raised their rates almost 10 years ago now, and it stuck. Prior to that they were $10/month. SOE is the root of all evil as far as MMOs go.

technically they were never your Neopets. The Eula on typical online games state ownership of all virtual goods reside with the publishers. Thats how they can make things like gold farming illegal as technically you are selling someone elses 'property'.

You laugh but I know people that are proud of their 500+ days/played. How about all those pets they grinned up and collected? the more than 12k achievement points that "don't mean anything"?
Even baring the pets you can buy, alto of people sunk their kids and marriages into this game. They won't just scream, they will take to the streets.

Can't argue. Anyone who needed "proof" that virtual goods hosted on someone elses server could disappear pretty much got what they deserved, minus a punch in the face. I'll work on that though if I meet any of them.

At first glance I was going to say "after XCP, OtherOS, and leaving unencrypted CC info on an internet facing database, what did you expect?" but on re-reading TFS, the data being deleted wasn't collected by Sony.

Maybe I should point out that "buying" data is stupid, you should buy media? Or that trusting ANY corporation to not be evil is stupid?

Big companies are too stupid to be evil. I used to work for Sun and I work for a large-ish one right now, and I can tell you the admin and marketing staff in them are sometimes borderline retarded. Just a few weeks ago, some marketing dumbass renamed our product from what it's always been (internally and to our clients) to a name that's not only incomprehensible, but doesn't say anything about what our product does. Trust me, they're not evil, just really fucking stupid.

Yeah, having worked near some marketing types and met others from other companies, I have to say they were mostly type-A personalities, and clueless as hell about anything. Obviously there must be good marketing people out there, someone creates the ads that are good enough to not get tiring quickly and generate a laugh or two, but the majority of people in marketing and sales seemed to me to be exactly the people I would not hire to do those functions.

But surely the new name is bold and fresh, ideally with some reference to clouds and crowd sourcing?

Coming from the support/engineering side, I am both grateful to marketing people for their skills, and living in fear of their next "innovation". Marketing are just like everyone else, in that seemingly destructive acts are more likely to be the result of ineptitude than malice.

The problem is, for every one like you, there's some marketing/sales person who touts cloud computing as the second coming. People and companies don't think ahead. And even those that think ahead delude themselves that they can handle the risk if it comes - except years later, they have a different job/role in the company or have simply forgotten about it.

Seriously. A person's "ownership" is just as virtual as the goods themselves unless and until they're given something that will maintain its usefulness even in the absence of the service from which it came. Until they get that something, they're merely renting bits, not buying them.

The same thing that will happen to any "cloud" service. Think of this as an early warning about the future of the "cloud". If you are wise, keep personal copies locally, and use the cloud for extra backup or convenient access. Otherwise when someone else's server goes down for whatever reason (leap day, no profits, etc.), you are fucked.

That's slightly different, in that the data would still have value if you pulled it out of the cloud. The challenge with a online game (collectibles or otherwise) is that they only have a relative value within a narrow system of the cloud. Without the game they have no value other than sentimental, which is of course important to some degree, but because you can duplicate the cards infinitely outside of the system they have no meaningful value otherwise.

And other morons will trust gigabytes of data on a single hard drive with no backups kept behind a dusty desk in their home...though I guess you could sell your dead hard drive for people to extract the trading cards off of if you really wanted.

Worse than that, it's why I don't trust anyone to host anything for me that I don't also have a copy of and a way to use that copy.

My wife wanted to get a subscription service for a Netflix-type movie service, given how much space 1600 titles take up with their packaging on our shelves. Thing is, they certainly don't have everything we have, and worse, if they choose to drop some titles or if their license ends, the titles are no longer available.

if they choose to drop some titles or if their license ends, the titles are no longer available.

So? How many titles do you watch more than once? How much did all those titles cost you? Is having to, gasp, find another source for an occasional title that is dropped seriously going to cost you more than buying all those titles to begin with? Do you really need to have access to 1600 titles at a second's notice?

The convergence of cheap hardware and cheap storage(thai floods or not, its still very cheap) means the barrier to entry for a PC jukebox is VERY low. I picked up a Lenovo dual core Athlon II desktop (with hardware virtualization, 500 GB HDD and 2 GB of ram new-in-box for $250). It now holds and serves about 350 movies in compressed HD format that i ripped from my DVD collection.

It also connects to my HDHomerun PRIME cable tuners and records, compresses and serves HD Premium cable TV (ESPN, TNT etc ), in addition to serving up windows media center to my Xbox 360. It also serves those files to my family members in remote locations. We have all the Disney movies for all the kids in the family mirrored at each location for a total cost of $400 (desktop 'server' PC + Apple TV or ) per node. Do you see now why this could be compelling to have?

Sounds like you have an irrational thing for cloud services that is, ahem, clouding your rational judgement.

Cloud services are good tools to use in the right situation, but they are limited in certain ways. Permanence of data is one of them. The idea of "the cloud" and its claimed reliability doesn't absolve the user of good data backup and control policies. As in all things, making sensible decisions about what systems you use is key regardless how much Amazon or whoever reassures you.

You seem confused. None of that matters to the discussion. Netflix is not a data storage service. It's not a cloud storage system for your digital good's. It's a service. As long as you pay you get access to whatever they happen to have. Nothing on Netflix is yours in any meaning of the word except maybe your ratings/comments. Nor are you forced to use only them. They're also incredibly inexpensive.

Now Amazon or Itunes are a different type of beast but we're not talking about those.

someone that wouldn't get netflix if someone walked up and gave them a free Roku player

Among households I've polled, one common mindset is "I already pay per month for cable TV. Why should I pay extra per month for Netflix?". Another is "if I cancel cable TV and sign up for Netflix to watch movies and scripted TV series, where will I get my sports and political talk shows? ESPN and (MSNBC|Fox News) are worth $60 per month to me."

No, it sounds like he has a well reasoned suspicion of cloud services, and you have an irrational need to be a douche who not only can recognize his very valid points, but wishes to try to deny they exist.

I trust Steam with my games... at least, I trust them to keep the games around longer on average than I can be trusted to keep the discs operational. There are also an operating-system lifetime issues, too.

It helps that Steam wrecking my games like this would totally demolish their primary business model (not so much with Sony).

Different problem. Books, movies, etc. have value outside of the cloud service that's hosting them. This game has characters... I'm sorry.. cards, in it, that people have spent time/money to acquire, but they aren't anything outside of the game. I suppose you could print off a PDF of all of the cards in game, but you can't do anything with it.

You can't just have a gnome deathknight that you refuse to store on WoW because you don't trust blizzard to not shut down the servers. The gnome deathknight doesn't exist without the servers, regardless of how much you did, or didn't pay for it (directly or indirectly), if you prefer a more F2P comparison, ships in Star Trek Online, or some of the tanks in World Tanks are examples of a this. You can get a statue made of your ship, tank, or gnome deathknight, but it's not a ship, tank or DK, it's just a statue of it. Without the world that makes it exist it isn't anything. An ebook is just another variant on book, book on papyrus, book on paper, book from printing press, book in german, book in english, book in electronic format, and without amazon you'd be locked out of the only format of that book you paid for, even though one of the other book formats would still have had value to you. A Magic The gathering card stored 'in the cloud' that you could access anywhere would still have play value if you could take it out of the cloud if the service was to shut down, as you could still play the game without the cloud storage. In this case the game is shutting down, and the data it has can't be 'pulled out' separately.

Whether or not it's a good idea to pay for virtual cards vs physical ones is a whole other argument.

A more interesting question is whether or not you are more likely to lose your own data (house fire, hard drive/raid failure etc.) than amazon is. For most people on/. the answer is a definitive no, since we are savvy enough to have various layers of storage for our stuff. But that isn't true of everyone. If all your data is on one computer with one hard drive and it gets stolen/fails/etc you're SOL.

I used to playing on MUDs. I never liked them more than my paper and dice based RPGs. I don't really understand this overemphasis on virtual property. I've played WoW and Magic online. I understand that one pays real money for virtual goods, but I prefer to think of it as paying to extend a gaming experience. None of these items have value to me outside of the context of the game. So, once the game is over, that's it. In Dungeons & Dragons (before all this computer gaming), I once had a +5 Holy Avenger

I don't like Sony any more than most people here, but let's face it. Online game servers shutting down are bound to happen eventually. Accordingly, it's implied that purchases made in virtual worlds won't last beyond the life of the world itself. There's no need to spin this story into Sony taking candy from babies.

Accordingly, it's implied that purchases made in virtual worlds won't last beyond the life of the world itself. There's no need to spin this story into Sony taking candy from babies.

Agreed. However:

I've heard some talk of legislating that virtual goods earned and traded in games should be taxable. [wikipedia.org] This is not much of a story ATM, but it may become one if I've got to claim my virtual property on my taxes... How much do I get to claim as a loss when the game servers are shut down? Will the hosts be required to hold onto their server logs for 7 years in case the need arises to dispute a (fraudulent) virtual property assessment, audit, or to investigate (grand) theft v-goods?

How much does it cost to keep the servers running? Surely it can't be a lot if not many people use it and they don't update often.How many sales will Sony lose on other products now they have annoyed another few thousand users?

Actually, if the game is of no value to Sony any more, they should sell the rights to someone who wants to keep running the game servers, even if that's players who just want to keep playing. In that sense, Crytek offering Community Dedicated Servers ( http://www.crydev.net/dm_eds/download_detail.php?id=5 [crydev.net] ) makes their game worth more, since people can keep playing as long as someone wants to host the server.

Can we really call these virtual goods ? It's just a row in the game operator's database. The user didn't buy that data, they bought a license to access what it represents: some imaginary doodad with stats that is then used to play against other similar doodads.

I suppose the 2-second fix to this would be: you want your "virtual goods" ? Here:

'Own'. That's an interesting choice of punctuation on TFA's part. It's like 'breathe'. Porous materials 'breathe', but that's only a semblance of breathing-- they don't respire. You might 'own' virtual goods, but that's only a semblance of actual ownership-- you've been granted a license to use those goods, not true ownership. Even TFA realizes that, else its writer wouldn't have bothered with scare quotes.

[...] proof that any server-based digital goods you 'own' can vanish on a corporation's whim.

It amazes me that anyone has ever thought otherwise.

After 30 years of using computers and a CS degree, I can say one thing about any "pile of bits" on a computer: it doesn't really exist. Print your photos or use film. Keep your cd's and DVD's. Print out your important docs and put them in a lockbox.

I can't wait to show my grandkids the Amiga floppies all my old school work is on...(which require an Amiga floppy drive, which is physically different from a PC floppy drive)

I remain baffled at how companies like Wizards of the Coast think it's acceptable to charge as much for online versions of stuff as they do for the real items (example here is MTG cards). Why the fuck would I pay the same price for something you can take away at your whim for any reason (or no reason) at all?

I remain baffled at how companies like Wizards of the Coast think it's acceptable to charge as much for online versions of stuff as they do for the real items (example here is MTG cards).

WoTC attempted to answer this by allowing MTG:Online players to trade a completed set of online cards for their real physical equivalents (originally for no extra cost, although they have since started tacking on a redemption fee). So in theory you could arbitrage the real and virtual versions.

I'd like to know who thinks these things will last forever. The crap on their own hard drives won't last forever, why would they expect crap on someone else's computer to be there? Why would anyone even pay money for virtual goods instead of real goods? They deserve to lose their virtual goods, to teach them lessons in life. Paying for nothingness is about as intelligent as selling your kidney for an iPad.

Yeah, I don't get it. Not that I ever understood card games appeal. But, there they are! Download the images and save them! Play with your friends! Play with your enemies! Sell them to Dumb Kids! Learn the art of Sarcastic Expressions Ending with Exclamation Points! Today!